Wearable Health Tech: Many Promises, Few Facts

Digital fitness devices are the rage -- among healthy people. The healthcare community won't know the value to sedentary patients until unbiased research arrives.

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Personal health devices such as Fitbits hold promise, but healthcare providers need unbiased answers about health benefits and financial responsibility before they can consider prescribing them to more patients.

The overall digital fitness device retail market was worth about $330 million in 2013, according to NPD Group. This does not include purchases directly from a vendor's website. Fitbit represented 68% of the market; Jawbone UP held 19% marketshare, and Nike FuelBand earned 10%, while all other vendors carved up the remaining 3% of sales, NPD Group reported.

Most of today's users are early adopters, and are not necessarily the patients who would benefit most from these devices, said Dr. Daniel Sands, a primary care physician, co-chairman and co-founder of the Society for Participatory Medicine, and an assistant clinical professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Today's Fitbit, UP, and FuelBand users already are invested in their health, exercise regularly, and eat well, he said. By comparison, patients who live sedentary lifestyles and make unhealthy choices are unlikely to buy a digital fitness device today, Dr. Sands said in a presentation at the HIMSS healthcare IT conference.

Wearable fitness devices suffer from overinflated expectations and hype, said Jane Sarasohn-Kahn, a health economist and advisor. Device users want healthcare providers to analyze and use their data to help the patients improve their health. Non-users need more reasons to adopt.

Because current users already are typically fitter and living healthier lifestyles than the average American, healthcare providers need studies with control groups to determine whether the products actually encourage wearers to move more and live healthier lives, said Dr. Sands. Today's personal fitness devices could be digital versions of corporate wellness programs, where businesses encourage employees to quit smoking, exercise more, or reduce stress, he said. A recent study by RAND researchers and PepsiCo determined lifestyle-management programs had no significant effect on healthcare costs.

"Every major employer offers these programs … but they don't really have an impact on improving health or reducing costs," Dr. Sands said. "Does [Fitbit] make sense or is this another case of wellness programs? Is this something that's valuable? By the way, I'm a believer. I think this is very interesting and potentially very exciting."

Over the past six months, Dr. Sands has prescribed the devices for some patients.

"I've been trying to find out if they take my advice, buy this, and if it motivates them," he said. "To whom should I prescribe this technology and is somebody going to pay for it if I prescribe it? Will I get reimbursed for the time I spend reviewing information I get from patients? How many different systems do I need to track? Is it going to help my most difficult patients?"

(Source: Fitbit)

Doctors worry about data overload, too, he cautioned. "More data isn't always a good thing. It's not always good to do every test. It's not always good to do a total MRI scan. There's a lot of bad that can come out of this stuff. There are a lot of things that can lead to unnecessary procedures and anxiety," said Dr. Sands.

Some doctors will independently recommend these devices to patients. If there's evidence they help patients' health improve and insurers reimburse doctors for their work analyzing the data they produce, physicians will no doubt prescribe more fitness devices to sedentary patients, he said.

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Alison Diana has written about technology and business for more than 20 years. She was editor, contributors, at Internet Evolution; editor-in-chief of 21st Century IT; and managing editor, sections, at CRN. She has also written for eWeek, Baseline Magazine, Redmond Channel ... View Full Bio

These devices have zero appeal to me mostly because of the glaring deficiencies pointed out by the writer. Further, with a little effort/tech sophistication, the device can probably be bypassed to reflect whatever result the wearer desires up to and including collecting a payday from employers with health programs that include said devices whose knowledge of tech ranges from very little to zero.

At my last company, employees could earn something like up to $500 off their annual health insurance payments if they hit a number of health milestones, including loading in their daily walking data. Good health usually comes down to making smart choices and building them into habits. Wearables have the promise of supporting that.

In light of National Nutrition Month, there's a survey being done right now (http://nutritionandwearabletech.questionpro.com) that handles the current trends of wearable tech and its relation to health and fitness. Pretty amazing that $330m was spent just on digital devices alone - makes you wonder how much the market will grow over the next few years, and what sort of technological advances we'll see!

A friend just gave me a Striiv device, which lets us collaborate online. Charging it up now. I'm kind of afraid to see how few steps I take in a day, and do expect it will prompt me to walk more. Awareness of a bad habit is half the battle.

As with most technologies, with wearables there is likely to be a huge difference in experience between those organizations that are serious about using the technology to drive health outcomes versus those who buy (or prescribe) the gadget, expecting the technology alone to make a difference.

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